How to write a school report

Are you sure you know hot to make a proper school report? If not, make sure you revise the presentation studied in class.

Christmas celebrations

Christmas time is here but it is different in other countries. English-speaking countries do celebrate the most important dates in the same way we do:

• 24th December - Christmas Eve
• 25th December - Christmas Day - families usually meet for dinner.
• 26th December - Boxing Day - it is celebrated in Britain. Children sing carols and ask for money from their neighbours.
• 31th December - New Year's Eve - People have dinner and attend parties with family and friends. Singing Auld Lang Syne and kissing at midnight is a tradition.
• 1st December - New Year's Day

picture by Jacob Windham (Wikipedia)

There are also some important Christmas elements that you may be familiar with:

• Santa Claus
• Christmas pudding
• candles
• Christmas tree
• holly
• Christmas cards
• ornaments
• presents
• Nativity scene or crib

Do you already know them?

ESO-4 Europass

Today we have been learning how to make our own Curriculum Vitae in English using the Europass website. Even though we have been using fake data, we have learnt to use the most important aspects of this interesting tool.

https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/editors/en/cv/compose

This page lets you write your CV in different European languages, download a pdf version or upload it at the Europass site.

ESO-4 subject and object questions

Most questions are object questions. They ask about an object.
Where do you live?
Who did you see? 

And there are also subject questions. Questions we ask to find out about the subject. These questions are asked using 'who', 'what' and 'which'.  
Who plays football in this class?
What happened?
Which machine did Marconi invent? 

You can take a look at the following chart of question forms:

Form	Examples
Object Questions wh- + auxiliary + subject + main verb	Where do you live? What will you do? When is she coming?
Subject Questions wh- (=subject) + auxiliary + main verb   Notice that this structure is like affirmative sentence structure without the question word.	Who loves you? Which car will arrive first? What type of food costs less?

Now, try this Hot Potatoes exercise and choose the correct question.

ESO-3 revision for your exam

This term our first exam paper will correspond to the first two units in our text book plus the additional activities carried out in other classes. So you have to revise:

• be
• have got
• present simple
• present continuous
• how to get personal information
• how to describe people



Happy Verby Gang-www.isabelperez.com

• how to compare people and things

If you want to revise all this you can use the following links:

• unit 1 revision exercise
• unit 2 revision exercise
• present simple girl (Isabel Pérez)
• present continuous Guy (Isabel Pérez)
• Rosie's family (present simple/present continuous -Isabel Pérez)
• comparatives sheet and exercise
• on/in/at sheet and exercise

Finally remember to revise last year's exam to get an idea of what you might expect this year.

Henry VIII and his six wives

picture from Wikipedia

Today we have read about Henry VIII in class. As some of you asked about his marriages I have prepared this text with some information about this English monarch. If you want to know more you can either have a look at Wikipedia.

You might also watch the TV series The Tudors, which depicts this historical period very well.

PEL session

Today we have had a session in which we tried to learn how to use and benefit from the Portfolio. The E-PEL site has been designed to let us control and improve our knowledge of languages. 

Everything is taken into account: what we do at school and what we do outside school. Therefore we can also do many things to improve our English in and out of our classes.

This is the presentation that we saw in class.

Etwinning profiles

Hi everyone,

You are now working on your articles for the eTwinning magazine that we have, but you'll probably have to wait for your partners' information in order to finish your articles.

Therefore we might introduce ourselves so that our partners know us a bit better. You might write a profile (this is an example) in a text document or presentation, record yourself or do something else. Then send it to your teacher or upload it at the Twinspace yourself.

Obama has won the US elections

There is a good, easy to understand article in the BBC news website. Have a look.

picture from BBC news

CLIL- Elections in the USA

Capitol - from Banco Imágenes ITE

Next Tuesday, the 6th of November it is election day in the USA. This is the basic information to understand the whole process:

Introduction

In the USA there are two main parties. Every president since 1852 has been either a Republican or a Democrat.

This is a "single-member district" system. The candidate who is elected is the one who gets the highest number of votes in their respective state. Then presidents are elected indirectly. The voters are really voting for electors in each state.

In all states, the candidate who wins a plurality, receives all of that state's electoral votes. All together there are 538 electors (in the "Electoral College"). It is very important to win in populous states and certain states are known to be the key to presidency. To win the presidential election, a candidate must earn an absolute majority at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes cast nationwide.

Candidates

Barack Obama (picture from Wikipedia)

Mitt Romney (picture from Wikipedia)

He/she must be a natural-born citizen of the United States, be at least 35 years of age, and have been a resident of the United States for 14 years.

Candidates in each party are usually chosen in primary elections within the year before the election. These can be closed and semiclosed (as in Arizona), open (as in Missouri) or blanket primaries (as in Louisiana).
The two candidates for this year's election are Barack Obama (Democrat) and Mitt Romney (Republican).

Length of term

The president is in office for 4 years and can be reelected only once so he/she can be in office for 8 years.

Voters

Anyone who is 18 years of age can vote. There is no national list of eligible voters, so a citizen must first qualify by becoming registered. Citizens register to vote in conjunction with the place they live so if they move to a new location, they typically have to register again.

How is the president elected?

Voters don't choose the president directly. They vote for electors who are members of a party.

Dates

The election day is on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.  In December the 538 electors meet in each states’s capitol to formally elect the President.
The congress meets in joint session to count the electoral votes January 6 and the elected candidate will become president on the 20th of January.

Interesting links if you need more information:

• Elections in the USA
• List of USA presidents
• Declaration of Independence

ESL / EFL comparatives and superlatives

These last weeks we have been studying comparative and superlative structures in our classes.  This chart summarizes the main points that you have to keep in mind:

If you want to download the worksheet used in class, click here and if you want to check if you already know this grammar structure, you may try this Hot Potatoes exercise.

Halloween time

Halloween is a Celtic-origin celebration that is particularly popular in the USA as Sarah has told us in class this week.
If you want to know more about it you may:

•  Read the history of this celebration-adapted

• Read the article in Wikipedia

• Sarah Adams's presentation

• Try this easy test 

• Read Sam Donnelly's presentation

Can you write numbers correctly?

How good are you at writing numbers correctly? Just try this test and you will know.

 You can also find more exercises in the web.These seem interesting.

about Sarah and Florida

Hi everyone!
Have you seen Sarah's page? She has just written about her home city Tampa, the food and animals that can be seen there.
Have a look!

Activity for physical description classes

Describe some of Amy's friends:

Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union

This morning the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union. As the BBC says "The EU wins the Nobel Peace Prize for six decades of advancement of peace, reconciliation and human rights in Europe". If you want to read more about this topic:

• BBC news - article
• BBC news - the video
• BBC news - the European Union

The European Day of Languages

The European Day of Languages is celebrated every year on the 26th of September. The European Commission has prepared some activities for schools to promote awareness of the richness of knowing several languages and being able to communicate with as many people as possible. This is part of our European cultural heritage.

This is the official site where you can find more information about this date.

 

And if you want to learn a lot more, the European Commission has elaborated a number of documents that highlight different aspects about multilingual diversity in Europe. Just have a look.